[Futurework] I like (some) pop music (was: Classical Music in Enlgand)

[Keith Hudson]

At 10:20 01/06/2003 -0400, you wrote:
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Keith,
You deny the experience of one of the greatest entrepreneurs of his day Charles Ives. Ives was a superlative businessman who earned millions and set the stage for the modern business of Insurance in the US. At the same time he was the most advanced composer of his day as well.He finally came to the conclusion that no composer worth his salt COULD write for money. He said that the audiences had lace on their underwear and couldn't take a good chord on the chin. That the only option for a serious musician who knew his craft was to choose to write garbage or to make a living some other way and write what the muse dictated.
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I don't know Charles Ives' work, so I can't give you my personal opinion of it. However, I would characterise his views as written above as that of an elitist and it doesn't incline me to him.
 
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What we we may be dealing with here Keith is the issue of the truths of one art being transfired to another and you coming up with a lie. However serious poets don't make a living selling their poems either for the very educational reasons you decry. I think the blockhead was Dr. Johnson in your statement. Too much Newtonian science and too little metaphysics that gave Newton balance to understand that he didn't know everything on the planet.
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Sorry, but I don't know what you mean by the "truths" of an art or my "coming up with a lie".  You're talking here of Platonic notions that I don't have any idea of. 
 
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Is Dr. Johnson Samuel Johnson? If so, he  did a good thing in developing the dictionary but his provenciality is one of the root causes in the problems that we have with English today. He began but many of the ways he began have turned out to be blind alleys or even negative.However should he not have begun since English does not fit Latin? His Dictionary was useful in an immediate way but it also was limiting of the language in a ultimate sense. But that's a different post.
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That sounds a bit elitist to me! I shouldn't say any of this in front of someone from Chesterfield (a provincial city famous for its twisted church spire).
 
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English composers have had a terrible time making money with their music and have had to make their living in other ways just as have we.
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When are you talking about? Some of the early composers such as Byrd or Purcell or Handel became millionaires. Several of the 'greatest' English composers of the last century had plenty of family money behind them, and were very comfortable without any earnings from their music. Composing was really a hobby for them, as it was, apparently, for Charles Ives (and there's nothing wrong with that).

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On the other hand the Italian people have a strong sense of what their lives are about aesthetically and such a feeling is always a shock to people like my daughter who just came home from a visit to Umbria. She wanted to move there immediately.  She couldn't believe the beauty and the wonderful people inspite of the fact that they don't like Americans much at this time. So in Italy you could make a living composing, writing, sculpting and painting once.  Whether that is still true today is another issue.
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I would suggest that Italian artists of the Rennaissance (Michaelangelo, Cellini, Brunelseschi) were very conscious of the importance of the rates they were paid for their work by their patrons. Later, the Italian composers (Verdi, Puccini, etc) were also very aware of the takings at the opera box office.

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It isn't because Art is dead but because people live more in the past as the past is written down. Living in the past creates a problem for the present and the education of the present.   In that sense, the whole of Art can be used as the English you describe are using TV.   Especially old comfortable Art no matter how wonderful it is.   Remember the guys who slashed the Guernica and broke both the Pieta and the David, were poor out of work artists.    Too much old Art can drown the present.
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I don't understand this, I'm afraid.
 
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The other problem is Entertainment.   The traditional solution of Augustus to create the public killing field and drown the public's woes in entertainment is still carried on in the West in the Television.    But Entertainment is the vulgar form of art and art at its most banal although murderous at times.     Everyone dies but everyone is not capable of creating greatness.    The audience can be an audience of dummies or an audience of masterful people conscious because they too can do the art and know its language.    The game of art is producing the winner who can MAKE an audience out of the other artists whether professional or amateur through sheer greatness.   Actors still do that in Greenwich Village in the bars where they perform scenes for each other for rounds of drinks.  
 
Economics as an indicator of art is such a collosal failure that I find it bizarre that you still hang to such an out of date failed  idea.    It makes all of your observations suspect in my mind.   But of course that is too easy a way out for me.    But it does make you a challenge.    Its good I like you.    Perhaps we could use that as a metaphor for the significance of "like" in all interactions including the observation of the three forms of contemporary Art.     Vulgar, common and complex.
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I'm sorry if my comments on art make you suspicious of all my observations. As you say, it certainly is an easy way out for you. Incidentally, I dislike most pop music, but there's a lot that that I like quite as much as classical music. Perhaps that observation really throws me into outer darkness!
 
Keith Hudson

Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England